Re:Termux and Android 10
by zozbot234 on Monday May 18, 2020 @03:44PM
(#23227443)
They're serving a niche market, which will always come at a cost. Your Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus or even Google device will not be running a mainline Linux kernel with wholly open drivers (ala x86) unless you get very, very lucky with your hardware choice (even the pmOS folks admit as much). You don't want to be stuck running a downstream LineageOS kernel with random patches and userspace binary blobs; it's a recipe for your device getting harder and harder to support and being dropped altogether, even by the ROM-development community.
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> Your Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus or even Google device will not be running a mainline Linux kernel with wholly open drivers (ala x86) unless you get very, very lucky with your hardware choice.
Only half true. There is a lot of activity on linux-arm-msm, and mainlining is much easier than it would have been a few years ago. Snapdragon 845 has great support (3d accel, modem, all that) and if your specific phone isn’t ported yet, you just need a hundred lines or so of board-specific config.
Personally I’ve been mainlining my Xiaomi Redmi Note 8T, with an SDM665, a phone released Nov ‘19. It’s only taken a work week or so to boot pmos and get a shell over usb, the drivers are already all there. It would be a lot faster if this weren’t my first time ever doing kernel dev.
Yeah, it’s a lot of engineering effort, but it’s well within the scope of an evening-hacker community project.
Yes, of course you can have a "lucky" platform that ends up getting more support from hobbyists and OEM's alike. The SD845 gets used (in an overclocked version) for ARM laptops, that's why there's a lot of interest in having it work "properly" and even be usable as a comparatively "free" platform. Most Snapdragon chips do not get the same level of support.
As I said in my reply, I have been porting my phone which has a 665, an SoC released 2 years after the 845, and it's a pretty smooth process. Each SoC has a different topology and vendor quirks, but they use the same few drivers and interconnects (glink, rpm, smd, etc). Many of the drivers I am using are for components more recent than the 845, upstreamed by Linaro and Qcom folks.